"It's almost like spring!"
That is what the radio host bantered this morning

"Only 6am and the temperature is already at 8 degrees!!"

Of course, he went on to mention that the wind-chill factor brought it down to -11.
I bundled my babies up in many layers and overthings and sent them out this morning with covered mugs of hot-cocoadicocco to seep warmth into their bellies and blood on this cold winter's day in the Mitten State.

The thought of spring has stuck with me like a promise or a dream and I took the chocolate milk off the stove- turned the heat up in the house to 70 and broke open a dr.pepper (chilled almost to slush in a cooler on the back porch). The sun is, indeed, shining today - bouncing rays of light from the crystal ice layer crusting the deep snow outside my picture window - - creating a dazzlingly radiant opposite of the oppressive grey dreariness we've been enveloped in lately.

Sufjan Stevens plays softly from my speakers and I"m curled up reading a memoir of Madeleine L'engle's - one of her Crosswicks Journals in which her aging mother, falling into dementia, comes to stay and Miss L'Engle's streaming consciousness on life and facets and comfort and tension and love and tears warms me.

My own Miss Madyline is celebrating life and the hope of spring and the tension of life's mysteries by sleeping in - and although it is well past 10:30 - I believe I will honor her with the gift of indulgence and comfort. Especially now in these weeks of our lives so filled with sacrifice and change.

I'm about to move off this couch to come out of this womb of blanket and pillow I've created in this space. My own room of comfort with the warm blue walls that have been the backdrop for so much of our lives and the sharing of moments here. I'm about to begin packing up my large cameras, my favorite books and my cds - getting them settled in for storage.

I wish I knew how to play the piano. Today it would feel healthy to speak my soul though the complex intertwinings and passionate undercurrents those keys have the potential to create.

At the coffee shop last week, a man sat next to me in my circle of comfy chairs, interruption my writing.

"60 days isn't long" he said "60 days isn't long, but so much can happen."

"60 days ago it was Thanksgiving - and I was strung out and I couldn't' get out of bed. 60 days ago I just started writing. I wrote page after page just to clean it all out. I lived it over again and it hurt, but I felt it instead of just living the ache and then, with each page that stacked up, I felt clearer, I felt stronger, I felt like I could live. That was only 60 days ago. It was Thanksgiving. And you know what? In 60 days from now...

just 60 days from right now.... it will be spring."

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yes... yes it will.

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